“They were wrong, and they will always be wrong, those prophets who say Art will degenerate, will exhaust all conceivable forms, will die. It is we who will die; Art will remain. And shall we — before we perish — manage to understand all its facets and all its purposes?

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Art thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.

Through Art we are sometimes sent — indistinctly, briefly — revelations not to be achieved by rational thought.

It is like that small mirror in the fairy-tales — you glance in it, and what you see is not yourself: for an instant, you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you.

And the soul cries out for it…”

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From ‘One Word of Truth…’ — The Nobel Speech on Literature; by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: BBC External Services Translation, Publ. The Bodley Head [1972]